Businesses are facing perhaps their most significant economic challenge yet, as COVID-19 continues to carve its ugly path.
Business owners have workers to consider, infrastructure costs, and bills to pay, but no or limited income to handle those things. For many, it’s a time of sleepless nights and brainstorming small business marketing ideas to come up with solutions.
Cutting costs is an inevitable reality, and one of the first things to go is advertising. After all, it’s not a staff cost or supplier cost, so it’s not an essential one.
But it is. In fact, BNZ’s former chief economist, Tony Alexander, said that while you may need to trim advertising, you can concentrate on marketing to targeted audiences instead.
Which is where I’m going with this spiel.
Advertising, even in the midst of a global pandemic, is still important.
Of course, you’ll think I have an agenda, and I don’t blame you. I’m in the business of marketing people’s companies, so it makes sense for me to want them to do that.
But let me tell you that the one thing you don’t want to do is stop using advertising avenues that have been working for you. To stop now is to undo months or years of hard work.
Search engine optimisation, for example, is a marathon, not a sprint. It requires countless months and years of content creation, metadata, strategic keyword placement, and more. The goal is to drive traffic to your website through organic search engine results. That doesn’t happen overnight.
To stop that now is to stop the flow of sales and leads – the very two things you need to continue earning money.
Instead, take a look at how your business practices need to change in the wake of COVID-19. Do you need to reword your content to reflect contactless delivery and services? Do you need to change, add, or remove any of your services? Does your target market need to change?
While you might need to cut the fat on your advertising expenditure, now is not the time to cut it altogether.
But aside from focusing on advertising and generating sales leads, there are also other things you can be doing to put your business in a strong position.
· Communicate with all your workers, banks, suppliers, and clients
· Look after your mental and physical health
· Seek help from your accountant and financial advisors
· Find out what tax relief the IRD can offer you
· Make use of government wage subsidies if applicable
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